vin8

Our remaining three days on the ship were mostly spent swapping pictures and just hanging out, but there was also the Ambassadors Ball. Everybody dressed up real nice (I wore my suit that I bought in Vietnam) and we were served a real nice three course dinner along with a crazy dessert buffet. In addition to this, we also transitted through the Panama Canal which was a cool experience. We went through several locks to get out of the Pacific Ocean and up to the big man made lake, and then we went down through a couple more locks to get back to the Atlantic Ocean. It took the full day to get through because it was a slow process going up and down the locks, and we also had to go very slow in the ... read more

We got off the ship in Costa Rica at about 10:30 and had to ride a tender to shore like we did in Malaysia because there was nowhere for us to dock on shore. Once we got off the ship we had to wait for our van that we had rented to come pick us up, so we hung out on this little beach for a while before going to the restaurant that we had planned to meet the van at. All 10 of us piled into the van at about 1:00 and we started on our way to the house that we had rented which was about an hour and a half south of us. We stopped at a grocery store before going to the house and loaded up with food for the next ... read more

We got off the ship in Honolulu, Hawaii at about 10 am and immediately went to the most American place we could find…Wal Mart. It was really weird being in an American store where you don’t haggle over prices for the first time in three months, and it almost made me feel like I was at home because every Wal Mart in the world is exactly the same. The funny thing about going there was the fact that there were probably over 100 SAS kids that were also there buying all sorts of random things (I had to get a pair of dress shoes for the “Ambassadors Ball”). Anyway, after our Wal Mart stop we went to Waikiki Beach and enjoyed the beautiful Thanksgiving day sun. It was about 85 or 90 degrees, and the water ... read more

Kobe Hello all! So we got into port in Japan at about 8 am, but we weren’t able to get off the ship until about 11:30 because Japan has a crazy immigration process. First we had to get our temperature taken, then we had face to face inspections with immigration officials to check our passports, and then they even took our fingerprints. Once we finally got into Kobe, Michael, our friend Johnny and I got on the subway to go visit the hot springs on the other side of the city, past Rokko Mountain. It took us a while to find the right train to take, but we eventually made it to the little town that had the hot springs. Unfortunately there were no actual “hot springs” like we expected with waterfalls and natural pools, but ... read more

Hong Kong We got into Hong Kong at about 8 am, and the first thing that I noticed was how crazy the skyline was. There were tons of really cool architectural skyscrapers that were all in the foreground of a mountain. It was by far the coolest view that we have had from the ship while in port. Anyway, we got off the ship at about 11 am and I went out with a few of my friends to go to Stanley Beach. We took a bus that took us over the mountain (so we got to overlook the city from its other side), and into the market that was right by the beach. Once we got there we went and grabbed some lunch at a place along the pier, and then went and walked along ... read more

Back in Nam I had a lot of really cool experiences in Vietnam, and it was a really fun country. The first day we got off the ship at about 1 o’clock in Ho Chi Minh City and I went downtown with a couple friends to try to find a tailor so we could get some of the cheap suits that Vietnam is famous for. We walked into a bunch of stores along the main strip, but they were all way overpriced so we started checking out side streets, and the first tailor that we came across was very nice, and had reasonable prices (less than $100 for a cashmere suit). Before we got fitted and picked out the suits we wanted from a catalog we went out to lunch at a Pho Restaurant. We got ... read more

Hello everybody! I just left Malaysia, so I'll let you know what I did while there. I didn’t really have anything planned out to do while in Malaysia, so a few of my friends and I decided to spend the first day in Penang, which was the main part of the city by the port, and then head over to a little island (Langkawi) that was close by. The first day I got off of the ship, which was actually quite the process because we weren’t able to dock due to lack of space, so we had to go through a process called “tendering”. This entailed getting onto one of the small ship lifeboats, that seat about 100 people, and then riding in that to the shore. This made it difficult because the boats only left ... read more

India was unlike anything that I have ever experienced. The first thing that I noticed when we pulled into Chennai was how humid it was, and the stench that was so bad everywhere that you felt like you could taste it. The first day I was unable to explore the city of Chennai because I had to leave for my trip to Delhi, Agra, and Varanasi at one, and it was not worth it to try to get all the way to downtown and back in such a short time, so I just met up with the giant group of us that were on the trip (47 in total) and we headed out to our bus which took us to the airport. The two-hour flight was not too bad. They actually served us dinner on the ... read more

Hi everybody! I just left Cape Town, South Africa and am now on my way to India! South Africa was amazing. I got the chance to do and see a lot of really cool things that I will probably never be able to do again. The first day there I was supposed to go visit Robben Island which is where the old prison that held Nelson Mandela is located, but unfortunately it was too windy for the ferry to make it to the island. So I ended up going to what was supposed to be the 2nd best aquarium in the world, but it wasn’t as great as advertised. It was still pretty cool because they had a lot of fish that I had never seen before, and there was also a bunch of penguins there ... read more

Hello all! Namibia was awesome! It was quite a bit different from what I expected, and the desert was like nothing I have ever seen before. The trip across the Atlantic was kind of tedious, and I was very anxious to get off the ship by the time we pulled into Africa. The first day there I went on a 4 x 4 tour of the Namib Desert, which was very cool. We got to see all of the different terrain that is in the desert, and this really surprised me because there were tons of really cool rock formations and cliffs that seemed to be totally out of place because there was just sand all around them. The next day I got up at 6 a.m. and went kayaking in the ocean. It was actually ... read more